Chronicle of a Summer

Summer 1960, Paris. The camera asks people in the street a single question: are you happy. Then it follows some of them. A factory worker, a student, African students, a woman who survived the camps, a couple of artists. They talk: work, money, the war in Algeria, racism, love and boredom. At the end the participants gather in a hall to watch the footage and argue about whether the others were sincere. Jean Rouch directs with the sociologist Edgar Morin. The film is the origin of a term in film history: cinéma vérité. Rouch uses the camera not as an instrument of observation but of provocation; people speak because the camera is there, and rather than hide that the film takes it as its subject. It is a turning point technically as well. Portable cameras and synchronised sound were only then becoming common, and this is among the first works to use that possibility deliberately. The Algerian war stands constantly behind and comes up directly in the conversations; the film was shot while it was going on. The last section opens the documentary itself to argument: some participants accuse the others of performing, and the directors put that argument in the film. Who it is for: anyone interested in the history of documentary and in formal experiment. Who it is not for: it rests on talk, the structure is scattered, and some passages stay closed without the context of the period.